OpenBSD and NetBSD

[Ian Cass]

Hi,

I mentioned a short while back that I was looking into why this doesn't work
any more. At first glance, the problem was simply differences in values
passed to the kernel, however looking into it a bit further, the problem is
much deeper than that. I don't really understand things enough to know how
to fix it at the moment.

Anyway, the newer OpenBSD and NetBSD kernels now expect to be passed the
location of a memory mapped area containing various values including a BIOS
map. Older kernels did not insist on this and therefore got away with not
having this. Newer ones however *do* need this or they will not boot.

Ideally what we need is someone familiar in Grub, C and BSD to install
NetBSD or OpenBSD and either a) make it Multiboot compliant or b) make Grub
support the newer kernels.

Until such a time, the Grub documentation needs to be changed to reflect the
fact that it doesn't work for newer kernels.

Just a quick comment for those ppl who say, "Why not remove the direct BSD
kernel booting and rely on chainloading?" - direct BSD booting allows
diskless grub to load a kernel and mount a remote NFS root without having to
muck about with disk images and ram disks, which doesn't work anyway with
BSD.

--
Ian Cass
www.knowledge.com